7/12/2012

Random, Queasy Observations While Reading the Freeh Report on Penn State's Crimes Against Children:
1. Pathetic footnote: "John McQueary advised his son [former assistant coach Mike McQueary] to report the matter to Paterno, and neither McQueary nor his boss advised him to immediately call the police."

2. Pathetic statement: "No record or communication indicates that McQueary or Paterno made any effort to determine the identity of the child in the shower or whether the child had been harmed."

3. Penn State officials were more concerned with the fact that Jerry Sandusky was raping children in their showers than with the fact that Jerry Sandusky was raping children. Over and over, what people tell Sandusky and discuss amongst themselves is for him to stop using the team's showers. It's lawsuits, not child-fucking, that worried the administrators.

4. And another pathetic statement: "Again, at no time did [PSU President Graham] Spanier, [former VP for finance Gary] Schultz, Paterno or [former athletic director Tim] Curley try to identify the child or whether the child had suffered any harm. By advising Sandusky, rather than the authorities, they exposed the victim to additional harm because only Sandusky knew the child victim's identity at the time." These were adults, people with careers and families, who, like idiot teenagers who watch too much TV, decided to leave the police out of the picture and play Law and Order: SVU.

5. When Sandusky offered to tell Curley the name of the child, Curley declined to hear it. He merely informed Sandusky not to bring kids to the apparently sacred showers of the Nittany Lions. So Curley wanted to not have any obligation to find out about the boy.

6. Regarding enforcement of the polite suggestion: "At the preliminary hearing Curley agreed that there was 'no practical way to to enforce [Sandusky] not bringing children onto campus' after he was warned not to do so. There is no indication that Spanier, Schultz, Paterno, or Curley had any other discussions about any other enforceable actions that could have been taken to safeguard the children." One would presume that arrest might have done something for the safety of Jerry's kids, but that doesn't seem to have even been a seriously considered option.

7. Oh, wait: "Spanier told the Special Investigative Council that he did not do anything to prevent Sandusky from using Penn State facilities, nor did instruct anyone else to do so." See the problem was that, since Sandusky had not been charged with a crime, they couldn't take away his keys because they feared Sandusky would then sue Penn State. No, really.

What intrigues the Rude Pundit is how, on a bizarre level, the cover-up of the crimes committed by Sandusky, a conspiracy to protect a pedophile, is another reflection of our American culture where the privileged are allowed to get away with it, financial crimes, war crimes, child rape. This time, the victims were actually, eventually heard and the authorities actually, eventually acted. That it took over a decade to stop Jerry Sandusky bespeaks a failure of so many things, human and institutional, but, sadly, the one thing it is not is surprising.

Frankly, the corpse of Joe Paterno should be displayed naked in the quad until the stupid goddamned glasses rot off his fucking face.